Oak National Academy: can it really be seen as independent of government while being “strategically aligned with government policy”?

Can Oak National Academy be seen as independent of the government while simultaneously being both completely funded by the Department for Education and “strategically aligned with government policy”?

This is one of many intriguing questions behind the development of Oak as a government “arms-length body” (ALB) as of this September, the business case for which has just been published by the DfE.

The document is dated “October 2022”, but reads as if, as one would expect, it was written before Oak became an ALB.

This document sets out the DfE’s case for having moved Oak from an independent, though largely government-funded, organisation run under the auspices of a charity linked to an academy trust to its new status as an ALB providing off-the-shelf lesson programmes and resources to schools, in preference to other possibilities.

Those alternatives as set out in the document were to have “done nothing”; to have continued to have grant-funded Oak under its previous guise; or to have procured Oak’s functions from other providers.